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The 10 Greatest Bob Dylan Songs

'Visions of Johanna'

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Blonde On Blonde, 1966

"Visions of Johanna" is a tour de force, a breakthrough not only for the writer but for the very possibilities of songwriting. An extended, impressionistic account of a woozy New York City night, rich in pictorial detail and erotic longing, the five long verses zigzag between Dylan's acute dissection of one woman, the tangible and available Louise, and his longing for an absent ideal. Johanna may not even be real. But she is an addiction. "It's extraordinary," Bono once said. "He writes this whole song seemingly about this one girl, with these remarkable descriptions of her, but this isn't the girl who's on his mind! It's somebody else!"

Dylan's masterpiece of obsession — written, ironically, shortly after his marriage in 1965 — was a passion in itself. He debuted the song in concert in December 1965, to an audience that included ex-paramour Joan Baez and poet Allen Ginsberg, then played it every night on the 1966 world tour — notably in the solo acoustic sets. A November '65 attempt to cut an electric "Johanna" with the Hawks (under the explicitly bitter title "Seems Like a Freeze Out") had run aground after 14 takes. The Hawks were still too much of a bar band; the song's confessional complexity required poise as well as muscle.

In contrast, Dylan nailed "Johanna" on the first take in Nashville. The local session pros, supplemented by Robbie Robertson's crying-treble guitar, brought the right unhurried empathy to Dylan's vocal mood swings — from a whisper to a howl at the moon in the same verse — and unforgettable lyric images.

"I still sing that song every once in a while," Dylan said in 1985. "It still stands up now as it did then. Maybe even more in some kind of weird way."